A knight comes home from the Crusades to find the world he left ending without him. The plague is emptying the villages, processions of flagellants whip themselves through the dust, the churches are busy painting skeletons on their walls — and on a stony grey beach a figure in a black cloak stands very still, waiting. When the knight asks who he is, the answer is the one no one wants to hear. He is Death. And the knight, Antonius Block, who has spent ten years in the Holy Land searching for some proof that God exists and come back with nothing but silence, does the only thing a cornered man can think of: he challenges Death to a game of chess.

That image — a man in dented armour bent over a board, across from a chalk-white, black-hooded face — is one of the most recognised pictures cinema has ever produced, copied and parodied a thousand times over. But the film around it is stranger, slower and far gentler than its fearsome reputation suggests. Block (Max von Sydow, in the role that made him a star and Bergman’s lifelong leading man) is not really playing to win. He is playing for time — a few more days on the board to do, before he is swept off it, one meaningful deed.

Around that duel Bergman lays out a whole medieval road movie. Block’s squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) walks beside him as the film’s earthbound voice, a man who long ago stopped expecting heaven to answer and now meets cruelty with a shrug, a joke and the occasional act of plain decency. Crossing their path is a little troupe of travelling players: the gentle juggler Jof (Nils Poppe), who sees visions no one believes, his wife Mia (Bibi Andersson) and their baby son. Their afternoon of wild strawberries and fresh milk, shared on a sunlit hillside, is quietly revealed to be the meaningful thing the knight has been searching the world for.

Shot by Gunnar Fischer in a hard, luminous black and white, the film looks as though it were carved out of woodcut and medieval fresco: figures in silhouette against blanched skies, the burning of a girl accused of lying with the Devil, a procession of penitents under a wooden Christ. Bergman, the son of a Lutheran pastor, built it out of the church murals that had frightened and fascinated him as a boy. Even the title comes from a painted apocalypse — Revelation’s seventh seal, which when it is opened brings not thunder but a terrible quiet: there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.

That silence is the film’s real subject. Block does not fear death so much as he fears dying into nothing; he wants God to speak, to hand him certainty, and what he is given is a void that will not answer. It could be unbearably bleak, and yet the film keeps turning back toward warmth — toward Mia’s face in the sun, toward the small mercy of a bowl of strawberries, toward the idea that if the heavens stay shut, human tenderness still counts for something. Bergman asks the largest question a person can ask and answers it, almost shyly, with the smallest human gestures.

The performances hold it all together. Von Sydow’s knight is gaunt, searching stillness; Björnstrand’s squire gives the film its salt and its survival instinct; Bibi Andersson and Nils Poppe glow as the players; and Bengt Ekerot’s Death — courteous, patient, faintly amused — is one of the screen’s great personifications, more chess partner than monster. When the film took the Special Jury Prize at Cannes it travelled the world and very nearly invented, single-handed, the international idea of art cinema. Its closing image — the dead led hand in hand in silhouette over a hill against the dawn, the Dance of Death glimpsed by Jof — is the most famous dance in movies.

Decades on, none of it has dated. The costumes are medieval and the dread is permanent: this is a film about being alive and knowing it will end, made by an artist young enough to still feel the terror and disciplined enough to shape it into something close to grace. The Seventh Seal is where cinema grew up enough to argue with God on equal terms — and where it discovered that the answer, when it finally comes, might be a child, a bowl of strawberries and one afternoon of sun.

Tags: drama, Ingmar Bergman, Bibi Andersson, The Seventh Seal